C.A. Patrides,Milton and the Christian Tradition,Oxford; at the Clarendon Press, 1966

In 1962 William Empson published Milton's God, arguing that Christianity was the most fiendish religion,in fact, the most fiendish cultural artifact of any kind, "ever devised by the black heart of man,"and arguing at the same time that Milton's version of Christianity set forth in Paradise Lost(hereafter called PL)and De Doctrina Christiana,(hereafter called DDC) contains one key difference from the traditional version that greatly reduces its power to corrupt the mind and makes it just tolerable.Four years later Professor C.A. Patrides in Milton and the Christian Tradition (hereafter called MXT) undertook to prove Empson wrong both ways, establishing that Christianity is a religion full of decent and comely sentiments, and that Milton's version mirrors the traditional version as neatly, as surely, and as correctly as if he had used a polaroid camera. Patrides describes, forthrightly enough, in the second sentence of his book, the method by which he will demonstrate this: he will quote no "left-handed men."This presumably explains why he refers to Empson only once, and even then not to Milton's God .

One of those left-handed men seems to be a woman for Patrides writes, "While there is such a thing as Protestant devotional poetry, it was of course written largely by Anglicans allied to the Catholic tradition"(p.145). This would consist with Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poeticsif one inserted into it the word not.It's a pity these famous scholar-critics won't stop dismissing each other and start really engaging with each other.One wonders why Lewalski thinks all that verse is Protestant, and why Patrides thinks it is Anglo-Catholic.

But what,in general, is a "left-handed man"? Clearly a writer whose view of Christianity supports Empson's judgment. When the left-handed men have been subtracted, no one remains except writers who support Patrides's preconceived notions of Christianity and Milton. This is the method by which Barbara Lewalski proved that the religious lyrists of 17th-Century England were Protestant. You take a vote and count only the ayes.(See my essay,"Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics,"in this website.)

As I showed in "John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..."the 16th and 17th Centuries were an age of sudden lucidity when theologians discovered that God was horrible, and said so. Such language was abolished in the 20th Century when liberal Protestant churches adopted a relation to fundamentalist ones like the relation of front organizations to the totalitarian states they represented in the 1940's and 50's. So eager is Patrides to bring Milton and all of Christendom into conformity with these 20th Century liberal churches that he quotes them as if they had a bearing on the case. To show that Milton's depiction of the Last Judgment in PL XII is in conformity with the whole Christian tradition from the apostles to this minute, he quotes books published in 1896, 1908, 1945, 1948, 1950, 1954, 1959, 1961, and 1963 (p. 267, note).The whole exposition presupposes a Christian scheme of belief according to which Milton, guided by the Holy Spirit, harmonized with both the theology that came before him and the theology that came after him.

But even this is not enough, for Patrides must sort out the contents of his source documents and quote only those parts that support his views, tacitly or explicitly consigning the rest to the rubbish-heap. Consider, for example, Milton's concept of original sin. Patrides quotes DDC:

what sin can be named, which was not included in this one act? It comprehended at once distrust in the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony;in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance (MXT, pp. 103-4).

Patrides' situation is that he must set forth the doctrine of original sin in such manner as to throw a gloss of reasonableness and justice over it or at least to diminish its horror. That God should punish every human being ever born because Eve, in Stephen Dedalus's phrase, "sold us out for a penny pippin,"is an idea not supportive of the concept of Christianity as a decent and comely faith. And PL, with its portrait of Eve honestly deceived by a talking snake, and of Adam with equal or greater honesty committing suicide for love of Eve, is really worse for Patrides's purpose than the folktale in Genesis. So, at this point, Patrides quotes a number of Protestant theologians thundering out, in support of the concept of Original Sin, the vast metaphysical implications of Adam and Eve's rebellion, and Milton in DDC (but emphatically not in PL), doing the same thing.

Strangely enough, Patrides professes himself well aware of the intellectual misdemeanor he commits here. "Paradise Lostis a poem,De Doctrina Christiana a treatise. It sounds too obvious, yet we should hardly be well advised--as has been done--to overlook the difference even for a moment"(p. 22). So he is aware of the difference between the tirade against Adam and Eve in DDC and the pathetic drama they enact in PL; and that the poem and the treatise are distinct. It is well for him that they are, for he uses each as the other's starting-hole.

Patrides had to row so hard against the current to refute the charge of Milton's arianism in Bright Essence--and, in the event, failed to refute it, as I show in my essay on Bright Essence in this website--that he conceived a dislike for DDC and termed it "a singularly gross expedition into theology"(Bright Essence,p.168). But in composing MXT, Patrides found this gross book indispensible and quoted it 20 times, a fact he disguised by denying it an entry in his index. The fact is that, in constructing his bland Milton, fashioned to resemble the liberal-Protestant minister of a 20th-Century suburban church, DDC is Patrides's refuge from the wild and disturbing passages of PL and PL is his refuge from the wild and disturbing passages of DDC. It's what Americans call a shell game and the British, thimble-rigging.

As we have seen, Patrides prefers the DDC version of original sin because it masks the monstrous unfairness of the PL version--which unfairness, as I argue in "John Milton:Supralapsarianism, Sublapsarianism..." in this website, forms part of a logical set of conditions simultaneously making God a most unpleasant schemer and preserving the free will of Adam and Eve. Conversely, when Patrides comes to the topic of Christian love, he quotes no fewer than 15 passages in PL praising the monogamy of Adam and Eve and defining exactly how it went wrong and was then restored (pp.163-78), but as to the matrimony in DDC he calls it a "strange conclusion,"(p.167) and one that Milton held with insufficient consistency to allow it to be equalled with the ideas in PL. Thus is Milton cleared of the odious imputation of advocating polygamy. With an assist from Galileo, I mutter:"And yet he did do it."

Similarly with the Trinity. Its incomprehensibility revolts a rational mind (see the essay on Bright Essencein this website), but this effect can be muted in two ways: one can draw hairsplitting distinctions about the technical terms in Greek and Latin used to define it, thus inducing a kind of bedazzled suspicion that it must conceal a great mystery, or one can simply ignore it, treating the father and son as no more and no less than two separate persons (which they are--in the New Testament, in Christian iconography, and in poetry). Milton quotes those technical terms,(essence, hypostasis, personetc.) ridiculing two of them, essentially andhypostatically as"synonymous terms tricked out with Greek adverbs to dazzle the eyes of freshmen," in DDC, which thus becomes a more quotable source on the Trinity than PL.(Yale ProseVI, 224) Patrides praises the chapter on the trinity in DDC because it avoids "the drama of the personalities in the Godhead"(p.23). That is, in PL III God the Father and God the Son are as vividly alive and distinct from one another as any two characters in Shakespeare; and the Trinitarian idea that they are identical in all their powers, virtues and operations would have made this shocking, from the day the poem was published, if anyone had ever taken the trinity seriously in the first place. That PL was read for 156 years before anyone discovered its arianism is, as Empson pointed out, the measure of the frivolity with which Christians pretend to believe the trinity. The suspicion of arianism--or as the Yale editors of DDC prefer to call it, antitrinitarianism--being abroad in the land, the best way to draw attention away from this suspicion is to discuss the shimmer of technical terms in DDC rather than the "drama of the personalities" in PL III. As, before, Patrides fled the heresy of polygamy from DDC to PL, now he flees the heresy of arianism from PL to DDC.

An oddity of this passage of MXT is that material from Bright Essencereappears, as if Patrides thought one book was not enough for it. The elaborate chart of the words ousia,essentia, substantia etc., on p. 17 had appeared on p. 5 of Bright Essencewithout (literally) an iota of difference.

When this persistent citing of whichever text supports his views, and dismissing or ignoring whichever does not, fails Patrides, he resorts to the last refuge of a Christian commentator: he invokes metaphor. In God's tripartite division of mankind, discussed in "John Milton:Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians..."the deity says:

...my day of grace

They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;

But hard be hardn'd, blind be blinded more,

That they may stumble on, and deeper fall(III.198-201).

Patrides comments:

Accepted literally we find the statement revolting. But of course the Father speaks metaphorically (p.210).

Revolting! The word startles the reader and arouses the suspicion that more Miltonists agree with Empson than are willing to admit it. The lines are nothing but a portrayal of reprobation, a doctrine shared by papists, Anglicans, Puritans, and Milton himself. If it is revolting that God, after the expiration of a period called the day of grace, takes away from persistent sinners their last chance of heaven and instills into them the moral qualities that will make them worse and worse till they end in hell, there is no help for it; that is what the verses mean. The metaphors taste, harden, blind, stumble,and fall are so traditional and well-known that they are scarcely metaphors at all.No interpretation of them can hold out hope of salvation to sinners who have idled away the day of grace. With his blithe talk of metaphor, Patrides claims the right to abolish any verse or verses of PL that refuse to fit into his scheme--which is, I repeat, the theology of a suburban Protestant church whose minister would never declare any class of human beings to be without hope. In the tough and virile 17th century when Christians did not hesitate to show the iron fist beneath their velvet glove,everybody accepted reprobation, including John Bunyan who for three years believed himself among the doomed.

I called metaphor the last refuge of a Christian commentator, but there is another equally desperate, namely hinting that the author, like Homer, nodded and said something he didn't really mean. The doctrine of Augustine's most eligible for this treatment is his astounding and appalling notion that a baby who dies without baptism pays for his or her bad luck with an eternity of torture. This was too much for the medieval theologians, though the witches in Macbeth accepted it, so the stuation was alleviated with limbo infantorum and the theologians who denied that were sneered at as infantium tortores. John Calvin revived the Augustinian doctrine but called it, with that Reformation candor I have mentioned, ce decret qui doit nous espouvanter,this decree which should terrify us.Patrides argues that Augustine stumbled into the damnation of unbaptized babes while pushing the idea of humanity's dependence on grace to unprecedented lengths, as he was compelled to do by the menace of the Pelagian heresy. Patrides handles this delicate point as follows:

In an attempt to counteract the destructive implications of Pelagianism, Augustine shifted the emphasis from the human plane to the divine by stressing mankind's dependence on the Creator, the inability of the human race to raise itself unaided, and the primacy of divine grace in each and every act undertaken by man. The Augustinian doctrine of depravation and predestination, of free will and the damnation of unbaptized infants, cannot be divorced from his reiterated conviction that divine grace through the Son of God is the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith (p.99).

What a noble pair of goals--to "shift the emphasis from the human plane to the divine," and to preserve "the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith." And how deftly "the damnation of unbaptized infants," by a trick of grammar, is smuggled in as one of many small parts of these noble goals, so that Augustine must be excused for believing it. Or need we excuse him?If the damnation of unbaptized infants is part of the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith, must we not accept it ourselves, even in the 21st Century? We might devise a greeting card for mothers of stillborn children: "Dear X,Please be assured that every pang your darling suffers in his eternity of torture goes to counteract Pelagianism and maintain the fundamental tenet of the Christian faith."

In short, Patrides has taken on the lore of Christianity not as a historian or a scholar, but as an advocate,laying stress on the parts that are seemly and trying to reinterpret, disguise or hide those that are not. To demonstrate this, I would like to examine what he takes from and what he leaves in the works of the two church fathers, Tertullian (A.D. 155-225) and Augustine (354-430), both of whom had interesting things to say about the munus, or ritual bloodshed as a funerary rite. These things are unmentioned by Patrides though he quotes Tertullian 18 times and Augustine 60 times.

All readers of Augustine's Confessions will remember the story of the author's friend Alypius, who, before becoming a pious Christian and ultimately a bishop, underwent an adventure like a modern tale of recovery from heroin or alcohol addiction. Alypius, like Augustine, wanted to become a Christian, but as Augustine must overcome his addiction to a youthful concubine, Alypius must overcome his addiction to the munus.

This had originated in republican Rome in a belief that the souls of the dead required warm human blood to enable them to rest in peace, a concept not unlike that in the Odyssey when Odysseus must nourish the dead with sheep's blood. Hence at the funerals of wealthy citizens their mourners supplied them (munus means supply) with blood shed by gladiators, and runaway slaves or convicts who were tied to posts rendering them helpless to flee wild beasts that lacerated them. In the empire, the muneragrew hugely in size, in number (76 days a year were set aside for them), and in extravagance. The spectators now saw them as entertainment only, or as Tertullian says, "by degrees [the Romans'] refinement came up to their cruelty,"(tr. the Rev. S. Thelwall) that is, what had always been a barbarous custom--human sacrifice--now took on the additional evil of being practiced solely for pleasure. The point must be stressed, however, that the munera were retrograde; they were not a kind of decadant debauchery invented in the Rome of the Caesars, much less a form of cruel death devised ad hoc for the early Christians, but a traditional ceremony of human sacrifice, preserved long after human sacrifice had died out all over the Mediterranean basin, and even in Rome itself had become illegal, the munus preserving vestigial religious rites while being speciously justified under other rubrics such as execution of criminals. Paradoxically, the Romans accused the Christians of practicing human sacrifice, because of their endless rhetoric about the blood of Christ appeasing the anger of Jehovah, and hence Tertullian says,"If we are what we are said to be,let us regale ourselves [in the amphitheater] with human blood"(Si tales sumus qualis dicimur, delectemur sanguine humano--De Spectaculis, IXX)--as who should say," You accuse usof human sacrifice? You're the ones who are doing that."

So Alypius's addiction to the amphitheater was not the deadly sin of cruelty. There never has been a deadly sin of cruelty anyway; to enjoy watching the death-agonies of another human being has never been categorically condemned in Christendom and has sometimes been as lavishly provided for as in the age of the munus. Alypius felt guilty about his love for munera because they were pagan ceremonies, dedicated to gods who were really devils; and because the intensity of his enjoyment obstructed his love for God. Tertullian warns about that intense enjoyment:"suppose one should enjoy the shows in a moderate way... still he is not undisturbed in mind, without some unuttered movings of the inner man. No one partakes of pleasures such as these without their strong excitements"(tr. Thelwall,IXX. Nemo ad voluptatem venit sine affectu).

What was this voluptas, this pleasure, too strong to be enjoyed in moderation,moderate et probe, without getting carried away (sine affectu)? Seneca answers that question:

[Behold the] retinue of swords and fire and chains and a mob of beasts...let loose upon the disembowelled entrails of men. Picture to yourself under this head the prison, the cross, the rack, the hook, and the stake which they drive straight through a man until it protrudes from his throat. Think of human limbs torn apart by chariots driven in opposite directions, of the terrible shirt smeared with and interwoven with inflammable materials, and of all the other contrivances devised by cruelty... It is not surprising, then, if our greatest terror is of such a fate (quoted in Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man, Harcourt, Brace, N.Y., 1944:p.46).

Alypius, after a period of abstinence from this voluptas,by chance ran into merry companions in the street, who, for a practical joke, dragged him to the amphitheater and forced him into a seat. As the show got under way, he covered his eyes with his hands, determined to keep up his attempt at virtue in spite of all opposition. But when a mighty crowd roar announced that something momentous had happened down in the arena, it was too much for him. With a peek-a-boo Alypius glimpsed a sight of fatal fascination: a gladiator had received a sword-stroke so well-aimed that he was down on the sand, his blood spurting on it. "The instant [Alypius] saw that blood, he sucked in the spirit of inhumanity...without knowing what he was doing he drank in madness, and took delight in that wicked fight, and became drunk on a pleasure that dripped with blood" (ut enim vidit illum sanguinem, immanitatem simul ebibit... et hauriebat furias et nesciebat, et delectabatur scelere certaminis, et cruenta voluptate inebriabatur.--Confessiones, VI.viii.13).Soon Alypius was going to the amphitheater as often as he could, and even dragging others as he had himself been dragged. Connoisseurs of drug-recovery stories will recognize the theme known as "nibbling" or "chipping"; a recovering alcoholic enters a bar intending to drink one glass of beer only, and instead drinks ten whiskeys. Ultimately, Alypius achieved a munera-free life.

The story of Alypius and Tertullian's On the Showsjointly demonstrate that the enticements of the munusvexed Christian catechumens for a period of between two and three centuries. Tertullian laments that some persons, after professing a Christian life, continue to frequent the shows, to wit, the munus, stage-plays, boxing and wrestling matches, chariot races, gladiatorial fights. Other persons who desire to become Christians are dissuaded more by fear of loss of the shows than by fear of martyrdom, a predicament Tertullian expresses strikingly by saying they value the shows more than their lives. Tertullian finds the munus ridiculous because, although a normal man would avoid looking at a corpse, during the munushe fixes his eyes on "bodies all mangled and torn and smeared with their own blood"(derosa et dissipata et in suo sanguine squalentia corpora, cap. XXI).However, his objection to all shows, violent or not, is the same: they all originate in pagan ceremonies, are dedicated to pagan gods, and involve idolatry.The amphitheater is as full of devils as it is of spectators (cap. XV). In the series of shows, however, the munus stands out as being the only one in which Tertullian finds that fatal attraction, that voluptas which imperils the soul because it cannot be experienced sine affectu.

Climactically, for Christians who miss the shows, Tertullian points out the substitutes their austere new life offers: with startling spiritual pride, Tertullian asks if there is any greater pleasure than disdain of pleasure itself,or than trampling on the Gentiles' gods. In place of the verse of the drama, there are the Bible's verses. In place of the victories of wrestlers and boxers, there is the victory of chastity over lust, faithfulness over perfidy, compassion over cruelty, modesty over impudence. Do you also want some blood? You have Christ's (Vis autem et sanguinis aliquid? Habes Christi, Cap. XXIX).

Pause. Repeat with emphasis.

DO YOU ALSO WANT SOME BLOOD? YOU HAVE CHRIST'S.

The story of Alypius has shown us what it means to "want some blood." It means a desire to watch other human beings dying in agony,their blood dripping or spurting out, this desire being so strong that you can't help yourself, you have to have it satisfied. Augustine declares that nothing short of the grace of God can free a man from it. Now we find that the wine of holy communion, drunk in the devout belief that it is really Christ's blood, can slake the craving of an addict and make him stop pining for the munus; or, at least, such is the intent.Exactly how compassion may be said to triumph over cruelty in this religion is hard to say; but perhaps Tertullian, if he could explain, would say that God's compassion on the elect deserves more rejoicing than his cruelty to the reprobates does horror. In any case Empson's dictum, that Christianity is an attempt to patch the old neolithic craving for human sacrifice onto the new transcendental God of all mankind, is borne out to the letter.

But that is not all; in further compensation, we shall spend eternity as spectators of a vast munus.

What is the hugeness of that show!What excites my wonder? What my laughter? How shall I rejoice, how exult, when I see so many rulers, whose apotheosis was publicly proclaimed, groaning in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those who testified to their divinity! and governors of provinces who persecuted the name of the Lord liquefying in fiercer flames than ever they kindled in their rage against the Christians! and whom besides? those wise philosophers, and their disciples, blushing in the same fire; they, who taught that God cared nothing for this world, who affirmed either that there is no soul or that it does not return after death to the body? And poets, shaking with fear before the tribunal, not of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of him whom they least expected, Christ? Then shall I hear more clearly the tragedians, more vocal as they sing their own misfortunes; then I shall see the stage-players, their acting more unrestrained as they are enveloped in flames; then the charioteer shall appear, all aglow in his chariot of fire; then shall I behold the wrestlers, not tossing each other in the gymnasium but tossed into the fire; unless even then I would rather not look at those, in my desire to direct an insatiable gaze at those who raged against the Lord.

The Jews will all be in hell, and Tertullian will point out Christ, in heaven above them, and will taunt them with the very stories they had vented to belittle the now-triumphant savior; that he is the son of a carpenter, or a hireling, that he is a sabbath-breaker, a Samaritan, possessed by a devil. The whole vast munusis what ear hath not heard and eye hath not seen, but even now, in this life, we possess it by beholding it with the eye of faith, and it is more delightful than any circus, theater or race track (Cap.XXX).

"Without knowing what he was doing he drank in madness...and became drunk on a pleasure that dripped with blood." In heaven, the delights of the amphitheater will be untainted with idolatry and unsuspected of derogating in any way from one's love for God. Why not? There seems to be no way to answer that question but Empson's: God created these pleasures both for himself and for the elect.

This vision of hell became a Christian classic. G.G. Coulton reports that it "still enjoys, after all these centuries, a melancholy notoriety"(Medieval Panorama,Cambridge, Eng.,U.P.,1939:p. 416). A favorite of atheists too, it is quoted by Gibbon in Decline and Fall and Nietzche in The Antichrist.To make it quotable was obviously Tertullian's intent. It is the last chapter of his book, number 30, combining the mystic numbers three and ten. In it he pulls out all the stops of his rhetoric, with isocolons ("what excites my wonder, what my laughter? how shall I rejoice, how exult"), ironies("those wise philosophers... great Jove himself") a long climax of clauses ending with the passion of Christ, and most horribly, a series of jokes about the circus-performers, stage-performers and athletes, to the effect that their screaming, capering and writhing in hell flames will constitute their best-ever performance: the tragedians will sing more loudly(tragoedi magis vocales), the stage-players will overact more than ever(histriones solutiores multo), the wrestlers will be thrown, not on the canvas but into the fire (xystici non in gymnasiis sed in igne iaculati). The Nazis, in one of their concentration camps, had a wooded area full of gibbets from which prisoners were hung by cords in postures causing excruciating pain; the SS called it "the singing wood." The genre of humor is identical.

One is likely to adopt, in the presence of a document like Tertullian's On the Shows, Macaulay's view of history, namely, that it progresses; that no one can be much ahead of the forefront of this progress; and hence that a man situated as Tertullian was really had no choice but to adopt the cruelty of the society around him. But it was as open to people in imperial Rome to reject the munusas it is to people in any age to reject the fashionable cruelty of the day. Tertullian, deploring the delight of the spectators of the condemnation ad bestias, in which a convicted felon was punished by being torn apart by wild beasts, said a Christian should "rather mourn that a brother had sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful"(Cap. XIX). The crocodile tears of this mournful declaration do not conceal Tertullian's acceptance, in principle, of the condemnation ad bestias;his brother needsthis dreadful punishment. Seneca, however, dismisses the condemnation ad bestias with a telling rhetorical question: "Granted that, as a murderer, he deserved punishment, what crime have you committed, poor fellow, that you should deserve to sit and see this show?" (in Mumford, p. 46). The philosopher based his rejection on a tenet of magnificent hope: "The vice of cruelty is not innate to man and is unworthy man's kindly temper; it is a bestial kind of madness to delight in blood and wounds, to cast off humanity and be transformed into a creature of the forest" (On Clemency , Paragraph 25, tr. Moses Hadas, New York: W.W. Norton, 1958,p. 163).

But what, you ask, has all this to do with Professor Patrides' book? The first ten of his quotations from Augustine are as follows: Milton cites him in favor of traducianism, p. 3; he is peputedly the most judicious of the fathers, p. 4;God communicates by metaphors, p. 10; defines the Trinity, pp. 17, 18, 23; how God spent eternity before creation, p. 28; defines creatio ex nihilo, p. 30; God rejoiced in creation, p. 34; created the world in order to impart his goodness to other beings, p. 35. And so on through 50 more quotations which I will spare the reader, an anthology of bland and inoffensive religious ideas. The only notions of Augustine mentioned here that might chill a modern reader are reprobation and the damnation of unbaptized babes. As to the former, Patrides argues passionately that Augustine puts it in perfect equipoise with free will(p.196); as to the latter, it is partly hidden and partly excused as I have described (pp.000-000). We hear nothing of Alypius, or his bloodlust,or the significance it gives to Tertullian's "Do you want some blood?"

The first ten quotations from Tertullian are as follows: he affirms traducianism,p.3; defines the Trinity,pp.18,22; supplies metaphors for the Trinity,p. 23; defines creatio ex nihilo ,p.30; posits creation involving benefits, goodness, and freedom,p.35; defines angels,p.48; denies the biological nature of original sin, p. 98; affirms the prelapsarian immortality of Adam, p. 108; makes Adam a type of Jesus, p.132. This also continues as before; it is even more bland than the Augustinian cento. On the Showsis never mentioned. The conclusion is inescapable:not only did Professor Patrides avoid "left-handed men," but he avoided the left-handed pages of right-handed men. The result is to distort the history of Christianity, soliciting for it a respect it does not deserve.